Why it's right for Google to resist the 'right to be forgotten'

I'm a fan of the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, a group that generally lives up to that name, but its recent effort to push Google into an Orwellian form of censorship, the so-called "right to be forgotten," is a massive mistake.

In a letter to the FTC, John Simpson, the organization's privacy project director, said Google's refusal to remove search results at Americans' request is hypocritical. "Without a doubt requesting the removal of a search engine link from one's name to irrelevant data under the Right To Be Forgotten (or Right to Relevancy) is an important privacy option," Simpson wrote. "Describing yourself as championing users' privacy while not offering a key privacy tool -- indeed one offered all across Europe -- is deceptive behavior."

The European Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling last May, and it stated that in certain circumstances Google (and other search companies) must remove links to consumers' personal information if the details are "inaccurate, inadequate or no longer relevant." The ruling birthed the concept of the right to be forgotten.

I wrote about this last February, and I'm not going to rehash the exact same arguments, but removing search links is no different than hiding library books because they offend someone or contain information they want to suppress.

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